


Home from the Sea

by SylvanWitch



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Character Study, Episode Coda for XXIX, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 07:51:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9593729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: James has never not loved the sea, and the sea is a jealous mistress.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Домой воротился моряк из морей](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10624158) by [Lazurit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lazurit/pseuds/Lazurit)



> The title is taken from the epitaph on Robert Louis Stevenson's grave in Samoa:  
>  ****  
> Under the wide and starry sky,  
>  Dig the grave and let me die.  
> Glad did I live and gladly die,  
> And I laid me down with a will.
> 
> This be the verse you grave for me:  
>  _Here he lies where he longed to be;_  
>  Home is the sailor, home from sea,  
> And the hunter home from the hill.

James was accustomed to loneliness. As a boy, even in a bed crowded with the breathing bodies of sleeping siblings, he’d felt left out. He couldn’t somehow synchronize his heartbeat with theirs, and it showed in myriad ways.

Mother would say, “Get out to the garden and weed, you!” and he’d go, but there would be a smaller pile beside his dreaming hands than beside the next youngest, a sister who was called “Katie,” though she must have been Mary Katherine first.

He can’t remember the color of her eyes or the way her voice piped, high or low. He only recalls that she was there once, beside him, yanking invaders from the hard earth of the garden his mother scratched out of the silty soil behind their cottage. His head had always been at the sea, never minding what his hands were about.

Even now he can remember with perfect clarity the call of the terns that circled everlastingly over the offal at the shore, where fishermen like his grandfather dumped the guts of their meagre catch. He can smell the stench around the wherry and hear the way the water slopped heavy against the pilings, green with the weed his father called dead man’s hair.

He can feel the rough wood of the table in the stinking hut that passed for a tavern where, when he was fourteen, a man with brutal good looks and a piercing blue stare seduced him into His Majesty’s Royal Navy.

He can taste the rotgut rum dippered out of a hogshead at the mast of the first ship on which he served.

He can sense the closeness of the broad shoulders of that same blue-eyed devil edging against him in the gangway, leaving little room for breath or doubt.

These things come back to him with a clarity born of consequence, how one choice or lack thereof led to another and another until now, fragile bone china cupped in his callused palm, he thinks of nothing so much as how Miranda would have hated the stinking hovel their house had become.

And how little it matters what she’d loved (home, heart, Thomas, him—once) or hated (an imagined cell, close with despair; James himself when he became Flint forever) now she’s dead.

Like Thomas.

Like Silver.

Like Vane.

No detail of Vane goes unrecalled, too close to the present moment, too immediate in the sense memory of muscles and mass.

There was nothing delicate in their loving, hands roughened by hemp and hard labor, eyes hardened by what they’d lost or thrown away, hearts out of it altogether. But oh, his flesh had been willing.

Thrown up against all that hard menace, Flint had panted for what Vane had offered, taken teeth to his throat, striped Vane’s belly, swallowed him down with a groan like a ship foundering against inevitable rocks.

He’d have bruises and blood-blooms, red eyes and torn lips when he left Vane’s bed, but it had been worth it for the way Vane eviscerated him, stripped him down to his elements, not undone but unmade, not even the dreaming garden-bound child but only the essence of the boy he might have been had he been given some other choice but the sea.

The hope the wide blue water had promised, the promise the first wicked blue eyes had betrayed.

So here Flint was, surrounded by the detritus of a life poorly lived, shattered china and broken-backed books and the phantom scent of jasmine in the reeking humid air, and all he could hear was a mocking voice in close, ghost heat against his ear, saying, “What are you waiting for, for fuck’s sake? Think the governor’s going to bend over for you? You’ve got to fucking shove it in!”

And shove he would. For Vane and for Silver and for Miranda and for Thomas, beloved. And so that his body could be planted beside this warmer sea, beneath a bluer sky, where the seabirds sang like sirens of the infinite horizon and someone, probably, would remember him.


End file.
